Down with the Old School

Funkmaster Flex gets his best bass from rock-hard American muscle

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

It's not what you'd expect, and the casual passerby would never know it was there. Not the kids zigzagging on their inline skates across the narrow blacktop, one of New York City's ubiquitous "number" streets, pinched on both sides by multi-family dwellings and nondescript factories or industrial buildings, all with pull-down steel doors covered by security grates and alarm-company decals. The el's rattle echoes a few blocks off, where people scurry home balancing pizzas, heros and bialys, all prepared and baked in the inimitable New York way that makes them the best in the world, hands down, no question--you gotta problem with that? Between the bustle and drifting beats, to say nothing of the el that races alongside the Bronx River Parkway, this tightly compressed neighborhood looks like the perfect setting for a hip-hop video.
Which, in many ways, it is. Move off to either side of the el and you'll eventually find yourself in front of a garage that emits all kinds of nasty noises from behind its all but blast-proof rollup door. This is what the hip-hop hammerhead Funkmaster Flex calls his toy box, just a little bite from his collection of American high-performance cars, something that's helped him define himself as a musicologist, radio giant, entrepreneur and TV host. Hanging tough with Flex is also an object lesson in why you can't decide what a person's all about just by taking in his attire or sampling his favorite music. Life in the 21st century is simply too diverse and complicated for that sort of pigeonholing. As just one example, don't assume that just because a kid happens to be African American and growing up in New York City, he can't be infatuated with red-meat auto racing.
"When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, I used to watch ABC's Wide World of Sports every Saturday, because you knew they carried racing at least once a month. So the racing would come on, only just as a short segment, and I became a big fan of Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, Ned Jarrett and Fred Lorenzen," Flex laid on us. "Then, in the neighborhood, the other kids would ask, 'What's this that you're talking about Richard Petty? Who's Richard Petty?' But I just loved Richard Petty. I loved the way he wore his uniform, I loved the red-and-blue Dodges, I loved the way he wore the big wide sunglasses, the way he walked. It made me want to learn about guys like Lorenzen. I remember going to see the movie that was made about Junior Johnson (Editor's note: The Last American Hero, starring Jeff Bridges, based on the Esquire magazine article by Tom Wolfe) and just loving it. I never felt that racing wasn't for me, being African American and from the Bronx, New York. To me, cars were fast and fun. It was the other kids who kept saying, what's it all about."
Cars? Those are annoyances that clog the few available curbside spaces or jockey to double-park beneath the el. Fascination with them is a phenomenon that exists only across the Hudson River in Jersey, where the privileged prattle on about their Range Rovers and 5-series BMWs in towns like Paramus and Park Ridge. Nobody in these remote reaches of the Bronx could care less; they all rely on the Metropolitan Transit Authority, right? Not Flex, as evidenced by the tremendously tricked 2005 Mustang sitting in the truncated driveway of his garage, and the welter of '60s muscle cars, mostly the offspring of General Motors, crammed door handle to side molding inside its brick walls. Right then, the cell phone warbles and Flex is instantly transformed into an urban whirling dervish, quick-handling the maximum-accessorized handset with a hands-free mike and earpiece, his thumbs nearly a blur as they dart daintily across the phone's BlackBerry keyboard. Yes, indeed, Mr. and Mrs. America, we've finally found a guy who's such a technological ubermensch that he can carry on coherent, simultaneous dialogues on a wireless phone and a BlackBerry without snagging a single, digitally transmitted syllable. Remember, we're your witnesses.
Flex is a guy who needs all the leisure time he can dig his fingernails into. The guy's seemingly locked into more deals that LeBron James and Tiger Woods combined. This is a guy whose umbilical cord to life itself is the headset and microphone of his combination wireless and BlackBerry. The personal communicator and organizer is literally never silent or offline. There's six days a week sitting behind a megawatt FM mike, more days connecting with the cutting edge of modern urban music, taping of his TV program, All Muscle with Funkmaster Flex, which airs on ESPN2, cutting promo arrangements with Castrol, Turtle Wax and aftermarket sound supplier JL Audio, partnering with the Ford Motor Company to develop special-edition, Flexified versions of the F-150 pickup and Fusion, putting on car shows from Atlanta to Toronto and lovingly building customized performance cars for a galaxy of superstars in the worlds of music and professional athletics.
Oh, indeed, the cars. One of the pies in the Funkmaster's pantry is called Team Baurtwell, named for his grandfather, which produces killer customized muscle cars. A (very) partial list of Team Baurtwell's clientele, and the rides produced for them, include a 1971 El Camino SS for New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi, a 1969 Camaro SS for Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, a 1972 Olds Cutlass for his erstwhile teammate, Dallas Cowboys wideout Terrell Owens, another Cutlass, this one a drop-top, for Ludacris, a 1971 Chevelle SS for L'il Kim, and other rides for the likes of 50 Cent, Queen Latifah, Shaquille O'Neal, Busta Rhymes, Mary J. Blige, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Boston Red Sox left-fielder Manny Ramirez.
For Flex, born 38 years ago as Aston Taylor in the Bronx, the loud large life began early, not so long after he drank in those NASCAR Winston Cup highlight clips from ABC Sports. As he recounted it, "In the Bronx, it was all about Novas and Dusters, but I was always into Chevelles. Street racing was real, real big up here. They used to block off part of the Hutch (the Hutchinson River Parkway, a limited-access highway) and run there. They'd race up around Woodlawn Cemetery, or on Boston Post Road near Pelham Avenue. I bought my first muscle car 15 years ago, a '69 Charger."
That was around the same time he began to make his reputation in the cradle of East Coast rap, which is generally accredited to being the brainchild of a Bronx-born disc jockey born as Joseph Saddler, but who became known as Grandmaster Flash. He was one of countless DJs who would haul his equipment and records to perform at parties around the region. Grandmaster Flash is believed to be the first DJ to use a record turntable as a musical instrument, marking off sections of vinyl LPs with masking tape and either backspinning them or manually changing their speed for a different sound. This technique allowed the DJ to improvise a song remix on the spot, giving him or her an artistic dimension that previously didn't exist. That, in turn, led to an improvisational dance routine called break dancing, and to the rise of the MC, a front man for the DJ who laid down a rhymed cadence in time to the DJ's work with his turntables. Combining the DJ with one or more MCs led to the evolution of the modern rap group. Aston Taylor would choose his performing pseudonym as a tribute to Grandmaster Flash, his inspiration from the Bronx.
The young Funkmaster Flex became fully immersed in the radioactive world of East Coast rap, with its vanguard at the time being New York-based performers like LL Cool J, Run-DMC and most of all, Public Enemy, with Terminator X whacking the triple wheels of steel and Flavor Flav providing comic relief for MC Chuck D's explosive, politically charged rhymes. Flex apprenticed with some of the city's most experienced DJs, and his push for success, obvious talent at cross-promotion and matchless street "cred" landed him in the 1990s at WQHT-FM in New York, better known locally as HOT 97, the nation's top-rated urban music station. In the decade-plus that's passed, Flex's six-nights-a-week program commands the station's largest bloc of listeners, about two million per broadcast - which means that about 10 percent of the New York City metro area's entire population is tuned in to Flex at night, an amazing number.
Rapping about muscle cars is a standard part of Flex's dialogue with his listening audience. That, in turn, led to his first shot at automotive-related TV, Ride With Flex, on the SPIKE cable network. Since then, he's been seen regularly on everything from ABC's The View, Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central, Speed Channel's Car Crazy, American Chopper on the Discovery Channel and MTV's Total Request Live. His next venture was the Funkmaster Flex Car and Bike Show Tour, now in its fourth year with stops in 2006 at 10 U.S. and Canadian cities, with corporate support from the likes of Myspace.com, ESPN and Mattel, and celebrity guests including hip-hop heavies Xzibit, DMX and Rev Run, the "Run" of the late, lamented Run-DMC.
Arguably, Flex's closest and strongest business association lies with Ford, which announced its alliance with him earlier this year in a statement that characterized him as "the evangelist of hip-hop's urban car culture." That same statement described Flex's mission to remake the F-150, North American's top-selling vehicle for close to a quarter-century, and the new Fusion family sedan--neither one a vehicle that's normally associated with black or Latino culture. It quoted Nathaniel Mason, then Ford's multicultural marketing manager, as explaining, "It's all about understanding and getting involved with people who get our products and who have broad appeal. Yes, he's got deep niche appeal with African Americans and Hispanic consumers, but he has broad appeal to automotive enthusiasts across the board, because of what he does with his products." The Flex-customized Fords are regulars on his car-show tour. For his own part, Flex, who toured the F-150 assembly line at Ford's River Rouge complex during the announcement, explained that, "With Ford, we just kind of had a good conversation. They did a lot of good things, and they really wanted a piece of the youth market."
Making the deal with Ford was a stunning coup for a guy whose personal collection is so strongly GM-oriented, despite its also including three heavily customized and modified 2006 Mustang GTs. The cars jammed into Flex's Bronx garage included heavily massaged Chevelles, most of them big-block cars, one each from the vintages 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971 and even a 1973 with Colonnade hardtop styling; Chevrolet Impalas from 1965 and 1969, a 1969 big-block Camaro, a 1969 Pontiac GTO, and his 1969 Charger bookended by a 2006 version. From his bully pulpit to the world's greatest city on HOT 97, the Flexmeister preaches a homily of safety and sense to his congregation of citified car crazies.
"I always try to push for safe driving, and for people to try and find an inexpensive American muscle car, something that's not too hard on the pocketbook to enjoy, because half the fun is just putting it together," he proselytized to us. "It's like being a success in business, or in anything else: It's about devotion. You have to be driven, you have to be patient, and you have to know your own weaknesses."

This article originally appeared in the September, 2006 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.